Try this: Put a black dot in the middle of a whiteboard and ask a group of people what they see. The most common response is “a black dot.” That’s an interesting response considering that 99.99% of what they are looking at is a whiteboard, not black dot.

Preparing for a big sales presentation often turns into squinting at the black dot instead looking at the whole whiteboard.

Your pitch isn’t about your PowerPoint, your samples, or your demo. Those are black dots. It’s about stepping back and considering your audience. That’s where all of your focus should be.

Here are six ways to make sure your presentation speaks to your audience:

1. Break down the audience. When I ask about sales people about who’s coming to a key meeting, I hear all too often something like, “Our champion, and the technical person we have been talking to, and 2-3 other people.” That’s not good enough. You need to know who is coming by name/title/role/length of service. You can’t prepare adequately for the presentation if you are preparing for the company rather than preparing for the people, one by one.

2. Pick one point per person. Each person who is coming will remember only one (maybe two…but no more) points that you make. If you just present and don’t design the point you are making for each of the people individually, you are hoping that they just “get it.” Focus on the point and then deliver it to that person in the meeting.

3. Pull in previous conversational threads. As you are presenting, use the language and points that your prospect has made in previous calls and emails. Include language like, “In our last meeting John, one of your key issues was redundancy and that is why we are emphasizing our unique approach to that issue in this presentation today.”

4. Name names. Companies don’t buy from companies, people buy from people. As in the example above, I use the person’s name specifically in as many points as I possibly can. I want the presentation to register with the prospects and show that we have listened to them and tailored our approach accordingly.

5. Build your presentation for a conversation. Simple rule: No more than 2 slides in a row without interaction. Your presentation — whether you use a presentation tool like Keynote or PowerPoint or not — needs to include intentional interaction as often as possible to keep your team connected to the audience and draw out the secondary issues to be  addressed.

6. Master your Murder Board. In one of my posts below, I wrote about preparing for a presentation using a Murder Board approach. This means focusing on all of the questions you are afraid they might ask and then getting your answers down cold just in case they do. This is a “must do” for every preparation activity.

This blog posted originally for CBS’s BNet November 23, 2010.  For more of Tom Searcy’s blogs, visit BNet.

Photo courtesy of flickr Voka – Kamer van Koophandel Limburg cc

There is always a “meeting after the meeting” in a big sale. Hardly ever is the real decision made at the table while you are sitting there. The way it goes is someone in the room from the prospect’s side will say, “Thank you very much. We appreciate all of your time and information. I think this has been good. We’ll need to discuss this on our own and then get back to you.” You press for a faster answer. They defer to a need to confer. You settle for a time to follow-up and then you leave.

…and wait.

While you are waiting, (days, weeks….), the meeting after the meeting is happening. This is where the real decision is being made and the real opinions are being offered. The influencers are making their arguments and the jockeying is going on.

Most of the influencers have made their final preference choice at this point. Each of the people will have their best choice and then an also ran that is a safe choice. Even if they are a huge advocate for a single company, they will not want to appear biased, so they select a second company and then play the comparative game. The comparative game sounds like this;

“If we want the best fit for the money, well then we should go with ACME, but if this is just a price choice, then I guess we could go with Alpha…”

By presenting their choices in a comparative fashion, they hedge their bets, they’re politically smart, but still advocate. The insight here is that everyone will present their opinion as a two-horse race, not more- but the influencers may have different horses on their list based upon their preference.

What to do?

1)   Be on everyone’s list – If there are 6 people involved from the prospect’s side in making the decision, and you know everyone will have 2 companies selected for their preferences, then you want to be on everyone’s list regardless if you are first or second position. Remember, if you are on everyone’s finalist list, you are the safest decision politically for everyone to make even if you are not everyone’s preference.

2)   Set up the decision-matrix – The best way to get on everyone’s list is to set the criteria for the “either this or that” comparison in your presentation. You need to analyze which of the possible decision elements will be the final decision criteria. Then you present what you think those two choices should be for your prospect.  Lawyers on TV set up the “vote for this, vote for that” decision in their closing arguments. The same is true for you. Make your presentation closing arguments with a statement that “selecting us as your provider/supplier/contractor is making a choice for….” And state what is your strongest 1-3 finalist criteria.

3)   Give your talking points to your advocate- Your advocate will need the expanded talking points around the finalist criteria to reiterate to the key members of the buying group. Make certain that you present these to him or her in an either/or fashion. Remember, getting to the list of final 3-5 contenders is what gets you to the presentation, however, the decision will be made after the presentations between 2 choices for each decider. You need to force that binary choice in your favor.

4)   Plan for all of this up front – Being knowledgeable about your industry and its players, you should be able to establish the either/or criteria between you and your competitors up front. One of the mistakes I see is the competitive analysis of your company versus the other 4-5 most likely competitors as if you were being compared in the very final decision, you versus all others. You are not. If you are going to win, the comparison will be between you and one other, head to head. The others will have been eliminated in the presentation round- you are now in the decision round and that is head-to-head. This means you need to establish a head-to-head analysis of your company versus each of the others one by one so that you will know how to handle the presentation of your closing arguments.

My experience is that if you control what the meaningful decision-criteria are for selection, then you can control the outcome. One of my clients is a contractor. Contractors can have a tough time of it because they pull from the same labor force, same material suppliers, same management talent. It is easy for a buyer to see them as a commodity, insure their risk through making all of the participants be bonded and then choose on lowest price. What they did was to present the either/or of “Price vs. On-time with Zero Punchlist.” They conceded price, but they were able to force the choice into an either/or, not a “you can have both.” They correctly predicted that in the two-horse race of the finalists, the fear of not being on time or having snafus would outweigh the price.

Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis in the movie Bull Durham was asked, “Just what do you believe in?”

Have you ever written that out for yourself? It’s a great exercise.

Let me tell you what I believe, at my core, about the whole idea of Hunt Big Sales…

I believe…

• That you can transform your life and your company through successfully selling large accounts- transformational accounts that are 10 – 20 times the size of your average sized account.
• It takes transformational accounts to create explosive growth in a company.
• Successfully selling transformational accounts follows a straight-forward process than can be taught and tailored to almost any company in the business to business sales arena.
• Because this approach is a process rather than just magic, it can be measured, managed and improved upon.
• That following this process gives small and mid-sized companies a competitive advantage in the marketplace over much larger competitors.
• Small and mid-sized companies need this competitive advantage more than ever because the regulation, cost-structures and the establishment are giving more power to the bigger competitors every day and it is not going to get better any time soon.

That’s it. The core of it all. My strongest passion around all of this comes from the last belief on the list.

As I look at the governance requirements that are being installed for creating “fairness” in the buying processes, I see the lack of fairness that is actually occurring. Procurement, purchasing and RFP processes do not create fairness, they create safety based upon not making any decision or choice that could possibly go wrong. The default position because of this approach is to either go with the biggest brand, the cheapest price or stay with the incumbent who very probably meets one of those two criteria.

Where is the dialogue? The creativity? The collaborative process of accomplishing something remarkable?

Slowly, these things are being squeezed out of the larger deals in the marketplace in favor of group think, no mistake, do-what-we-have-always-done buying processes and review committees.

Let’s face it, as small to mid-sized businesses, our key advantages come from creativity, innovation and nimbleness. Our ability to tailor our solutions to the real needs of companies makes us a remarkable partner for big companies and we can transform their performance through our work together…If we get heard!

But, the front door to this opportunity too often has a bouncer at the velvet rope and small to mid-sized companies are not on the VIP list for entrance.

My belief is that a process approach creates the opportunity to be heard, the right audience who is prepared to hear and the right approach to delivering the message so that small to mid-size companies can win big sales and transform their companies as well as their clients’ companies.

This is what gets me up in the morning every day, keeps me on the road almost 100 nights out of the year and drives all that I write and speak on.

What drives you? What do you believe? Post it up here, because those of us who are hunting the big sales and fighting the big competitors in the marketplace need to talk to each other and keep fighting the good fight!

Out with the old and in with the new for 2011. This means in the world of sales that you should take a run at some new sales ideas for the next year.

1) 90-Day plans only – The world is an increasingly uncertain place. Aside from eating dessert first, what other plan can you set to deal with this uncertainty? Whatever plan it is, including sales, make it shorter. Give yourself the flexibility to make course corrections during uncertain times. Goals for the year, plans for the quarter. Make a new plan at the beginning of each quarter.

2) Divorce Sales and Service – Efficiency comes from specialization. During the past two years you may have consolidated your functions some, including sales and service. Untangle them and get better yield from your people. This idea that sales and service are complementary skills does not test out- not in psychological testing or financial performance. In 2011, separate these functions. If you have already done this, then make certain you have stripped out the insidious “extras” that creep into jobs- redundant paperwork, overly complicated CRM system requirements and data entry. Focus sales on sales and service on services.

3) Lunch with the Enemy – I encourage an occasional dialogue with a competitor. Not treason. Just mutual sharing of market scan information, impressions of the industry, changes in the landscape. If you do not meet with any of your competitors, you are cutting off a huge source of information. Take 2011, pick a competitor, have a lunch and make a connection. As Don Corleone so famously said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

4) Read Differently – There is too much change out there to be disconnected. Pick three new blogs to follow for this year and follow them. Good bloggers have access to information that you need to know and they are posting it real-time, not in a monthly magazine or trade publication. The lengths are more manageable than books, newspapers and magazines. The information is more tailored if you select the bloggers who are in your interest areas. By changing your brain-food, you can change your vision. If your interest is sales, then let me suggest Daniel Waldschmidt, Mark Kennedy, or my blog over on Bnet. This gives you three different writers and perspectives to challenge what you are thinking and how you are selling.

5) Deliver a more complete solution – Companies are looking for encapsulated solutions. They have reduced staff and cut back on support. They want you to help them through providing more of the support around your solution. If you manufacture, then deliver, stock, inventory, replace and handle returns yourself. If you provide services, expand your scope to handle all of the elements of that service value chain. The point is, for almost all of us, if we diagram the entire value chain of our prospect’s and how they interface with us, there are steps before, during and after. Deliver more of the steps in 2011.

If you want to know what 5 things I think you should stop doing, then check out my latest Bnet post.

Entreprenuers are gamblers whether or not they ever step into a casino. My namesake grandfather, Tom Searcy, was a professional gambler up until my grandmother made an honest man out of him. Like most entrepreneurs, he bet on himself- golf, bowling, cards, darts… but never the ponies or sports. You see, he didn’t have any control in those bets, so he didn’t like to make them.

I don’t do any gambling, not even a slot-machine with a lucky dollar. No need too- I’m an entrepreneur and that takes care of all my gambler’s itch.

If being an entrepreneur is like gambling, let’s talk through your 2011 strategies. Someone explained to me that if you didn’t have a strategy when playing blackjack and just played every hand without either splitting, doubling down or knowing when your hand was cold and walking away, you would lose. What are your 2011 strategies? Here are a few:

Double Down – What strategies from 2010 worked to the degree you should be doubling your bets? This may have been marketing investments in social media or advertising. Possibly you hired a professional prospecting firm for lead generation. Maybe your website paid off for you this year. Whatever it was, I want you to seriously consider doubling your spend in this area for 2011. Too often we spread our chips around on the table and bet on too many things. Bet heavy on what is working and pull your chips from only marginal producers.

Surrender – What did you do in 2010 that didn’t work and you need to stop now? In blackjack, “surrender” means turning your cards in so that you can get half of your bet back. In business this may mean canceling an advertising contract, stopping an unsuccessful marketing campaign or pulling a product. Recently I advised an entrepreneur to cancel a 24-month advertising commitment. She said, “we have a contract, there’s nothing I can do.” Wrong. She went back and negotiated an early out with a one-time penalty payment that was a lot less than the total amount of the advertising commitment. Get back whatever chips you can when you know you have a losing hand.

Split Your Aces – Who are your real producers? Give them more. More of your bigger accounts, your better territories and more internal support. There is no “fair” in this entrepreneurial game. Your job as CEO is to make the most out of each hand. If you have a producer, then put your chips with that producer so that you get more out of it. Recently, I had a conversation with a CEO who had a good account with great potential in an average sales person’s territory. The sales person was not really making much progress. The CEO said, “It’s in his territory, so its his. I just wish it was in this other person’s territory.” Simple. Make it so. Figure out a commission split that works, or pay the commission on the past revenue to the one rep and the growth goes to the producer who grows the account. This is just one example. The point is, when you have a set of circumstances that gives you a chance to win, take advantage of it.

Chips off the Table – What should you close down for 2011? There are things that you just need to stop doing- pull your chips off the table. Maybe it is an advertising agency, a product line, a territory or a sales person. Bad gamblers live with the false hope that if they keep increasing their bets when they are losing they can make back all of their losses and turn their luck around. The palatial hotels and casinos of Las Vegas were built on these gamblers’ mistakes. Don’t make the same choice- determine what chips to take off the table and make the clean break for 2011.

As a side note- a great book just came out on a remarkable gambler-

“Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything” by Kevin Cook,

-put it on your Christmas list.

Another side note: If you’d like to read my thoughts on sales forecasting for the upcoming year, I just tackled that over on my BNet blog.

“Congratulations, You’re My 11th Biggest Customer”

What’s it like to be someone’s “11th Biggest Customer”?

In the constant sales competition with bigger companies for bigger deals, at some point, if you are smaller, your size is going to become an issue. This can be in an obvious way or in a subtle way- even unstated. However, if you are competing with a company who is much bigger than you are, often that competitor looks like a safer bet than you. You have to turn their size against them- and that’s not easy, it takes a little magic.

Here is the magic trick -

Ask your prospect, “Who is your 11th biggest customer for your company?” As they fumble through the list in their mind, drop in this second question, “What’s it like to be somebody’s 11th biggest customer?”

You’ve set up the conversation about size, trust and promises. Be careful, it would be easy to swing on the point with an eight-pound sledgehammer when just a finishing hammer is necessary. Here’s how the rest of the conversation should go -

You: “Being out of the top 10 shows up in a lot of ways in a business relationship- not always up front, but over time, the bigger clients always get the first attention in any of our businesses. I would encourage you to ask anyone you are considering for this project/program/purchase/partnership where you will fall in the order of size of their clients. Just for reference, you will be my 3rd biggest customer, (fill in the blank with the correct number in the top 10 for your company or your personal book of business).”

It’s simple – we all know that being 11th sucks. Sometimes a prospect needs to be reminded of this fact. Then the prospect needs to be asked to make this reference real to his or her own business. In our own hearts, all of us, prospects included, know that we don’t treat all customers equally. They enjoy that leverage when they have it and resent it when they don’t. This is our chance to drive that point home. Works like magic.

Large account sales success is 90% process and 10% MAGIC…

I spend so much time preaching and teaching “process” that I don’t spend much time in my blogs on the MAGIC that closing big sales takes. I am going to take the next few blogs to teach some of my magic tricks- those things that are not process, but still follow some understandable guidelines so that almost anyone can use these ideas to give leverage to your process and win more deals.

This one is known as “The 5 Myths”. This approach is used when you are in a highly commoditized marketplace and want to differentiate yourself with an experienced buyer. It is also effective when you are a small player and a large competitor has misrepresented things in the marketplace, but has used so much marketing firepower that the message has become the accepted norm.

Step 1: Establish the 5 Myths for your marketplace.

A myth is something that is generally held as truth in your marketplace but is in fact not true. Myths are often times created by big competitors who are trying to own the decision making reference frames of the marketplace and so they push these out into the market through advertising, brochures and other sales materials. The problem is that they work. Let me give a few examples:

• Myth 1: Price = Cost. Now, this is often times not true. When we look at the actual costs of a solution or product there are all sorts of factors to consider including, on-boarding costs, shipping fees, early mistakes and errors, training, hidden charges and so on. Price rarely equals cost. However, for the procurement driven buyer and the savvy competitor this provides great air-cover for making a price choice when the actual cost would be a better comparison.
• Myth 2: Big = Safe. One of the key decision drivers for companies in making buying decisions is safety. Safety is defined first by “Am I personally at risk for making this decision” and progresses from there. Big companies tell their marketplaces about the F.U.D. (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that buyers should consider from working with smaller providers. We know that there is no greater safety with a big company and probably greater risk from a lack of attention.
• Myth 3: RFP Process creates a level playing field. Right….if you were the author of the RFP maybe. RFP processes to do not create level playing fields, quite the opposite, they create unfair competitions that favor the incumbents or those who authored the RFP. We already know this. However, it is a myth that is widely held in large company cultures because it appeases the governance requirements.
• Myth 4: Procurement compliance means cost control. Everyone is concerned with controlling costs. Procurement or purchasing often carries the compliance requirements while the end-users carry the final budget numbers. It is a myth to believe that the accountants can monitor the true costs of implementation of solutions and in that way control costs.
• Myth 5: Certification provides protection. My favorite example of this is ISO, (where English majors find employment after graduation writing fiction). However, ISO is not the only one of these certifications that provides a smokescreen of value in the process. Certification is a starting place for true quality in a system, not an end outcome.

These are all examples, but you can come up with your own. The important thing is that you are showing your prospect behind the false marketing of your marketplace to help them make better decisions, regardless of whether they buy from you or not. All industries have generally accepted falsehoods that cause companies to make bad decisions- what are your industry’s falsehood.

Step 2: Explain why these are myths and what the truth is. For each myth, there is a truth that is hidden from the prospect. What is that truth? One of my clients is an HVAC distributor who finds themselves competing with their own suppliers on big deals! They use this truth in their 5 Myths presentations: The cost of a part is inconsequential to the cost of labor for installation. When the wrong part is in the wrong place, the cost of getting someone out to get that part is many times the price of the part itself. This is especially true on a multi-story building. My client can put the right palette of materials on the right floor and stacked in order of use. The supplier can only put boxes on palettes out at the materials lot on the jobsite. This is a representation of where the myth that price=cost could be dispelled and that the value of the truth overcomes all price differentials.

Step 3: Create a way to tell your story. In the previous example, I talked about the truth of parts and labor. The story sounds like this: “Imagine a $25/hour union contractor on the 4th floor of a new building working on the HVAC. He needs a bag of screws. He gets in the elevator, rides downstairs. He gets off the elevator and lights a cigarette while he’s walking to the materials lot. He gets a phone call and starts talking. Grabs the bag of screws and heads back but decides to get a soft-drink from his truck. Grabs that, lights a second cigarette and heads to the elevator. Gets upstairs and is about to work when he realizes that he is missing a set of vents and starts the process over. How much did that bag of $0.39 screws cost you? Of course you saved $0.02 on it, but it doesn’t offset the labor cost of at least $10. That’s why we put the palette with all the materials in order of use on the floor near the worksites.” By telling your story, you are taking your truth and making it their truth in their working reference frame.

Step 4: Put the key in their hands. I like to give a guide to my prospects at the end of my discussion of 5 Myths for them to use with my competitors in all future conversations. It’s simple- Give them a list of 5-7 questions that they should ask all companies with whom they are discussing this opportunity. The questions should represent an examination you are willing to undergo and should make them better buyers. By asking these questions, they will be able assess truth from myth in their future meetings.

Tips:

1. Keep it about them, not you. As you give your 5 Myths, take the position that you want them to make good decisions and this will help, regardless if they purchase from you or not.
2. Ask them about their experience. As you discuss each myth, verify how this relates to their industry background and experience. If they say that they already are aware of the myth, ask how they verify each of the participants in the process.
3. Commiserate. Wherever possible, show understanding as to why they have believed these myths in the past and then explain that it is an industry wide problem, most everyone has been snowed.

I call it a Magic Trick because of the magic it creates. When you show the prospect behind the curtain to the truth, their heads nod, their suspicions are confirmed and they have self-discovered what they believe will help them make better decisions. This translates into trust in you as a trusted adviser who showed them the truth. Like magic.

In my town, there is a billboard that says -

“Our tellers are actually better listeners”

and then shows the logo of the bank in the lower right hand corner of the ad.

Since when has banking become therapy? My bank has now replaced my best friend, co-worker, spouse and dog? I don’t need better listening tellers for about a hundred reasons, including:

• I don’t bank with tellers- I bank with bankers or ATMs and tellers are neither
• Only the lowest common transaction is given to the teller and I will favor speed and accuracy 5:1 over listening
• There is no brand equity to be garnered by the bank nor financial value to me for this elusive to describe quality

I bring this up because I spend a great deal of time with companies working on their messaging to their largest prospects.  All sorts of characteristics are thrown out as potentially the silver bullet differentiator – language like “market leader,” “proven experience,” “greatest value” and so on. It is so much fluff and hype, and yet it is offered up as the best way for a company to differentiate itself from its competitor.

Differentiation comes from the unique way in which your company understands and solves your prospect’s business problems. For big accounts, there are only three real business problems:

• Time
• Money
• Risk

The shift is in focusing on the way the prospect counts their money, their time and their risk. A word of caution- when we are talking about very big sales, money is not about price, time is not about service and risk is not about guarantees. Those are not answers to business problems, they are answers to commodity questions from your competition.

The second shift is that if we are not talking numbers, we are not talking to them. When we put in platitudes like, “Lowest cost of total ownership.” What does that mean? When we offer banalities such as “Highest commitment to service,” how is a prospect to get excited about that? We need to make claims that are valuable in a business issue sense to our prospects,  and to do that, our answers have to be measurable. Some examples:

“Companies hire our firm when they need to solve one or more of these business problems:

• Increase a division’s revenue by 8% or more in less than one quarter
• Reduce new customer defections by more than 10% in less than a year
• Accelerate new customer purchase persistence to 80%+ in their first month”

These answers are a formula that creates your business claim for the business solution you provide. This formula for creating these business claims is straight-forward:

FORMULA:

Prospect’s Business Issue + defined amount of improvement + timeframe

Simple.

A couple of guidelines -

1. Use claims based upon your past best clients. Indicate that these are the possible results, but that every account is unique. Your goal is to engage a dialogue that provides the information necessary to add precision to your claim.
2. Use language that is very specific to your industry so that your prospect understands that your value and your claim is designed for them.
3. Create a conversation, not a debate. Your goal is to reach a quick and shared understanding of whether the prospect has the problem that you solve and whether you provide a credible and significant solution. If you are challenged on the claim, ask the informing questions that allow you to tailor the claim to that particular prospect.

As a general rule, I avoid free-consulting. It sets a bad precedent. However, this bank is so clearly in need of help that I will offer some advice as a favor to all who pass their silly billboard. Here are my alternatives to what they are offering.

• 100% of those who qualify get loans in less than a week
• We make over half of the motorcyle loans in the area, want one?
• Give us your money, we’ll give you more back each month

Take your own shot at this last one.  I would love to hear some other alternatives.

I do magic tricks.

Sleight-of-hand-card-trick-illusionist-escape-artist magic tricks. For the purposes of commerce and being able to submit a client invoice that survives audit, we call it “Deal Coaching,” “Strategic Seat at the Table” and “Program Support,” but trust me, it’s magic.

This part of the job requires all of the creativity, risk-taking, strategy, experience and play-maker talent that I have, and I love it. I’m not alone- most of the sales leaders, regardless of title, love this part of the job the most.

As you might imagine, magic can be a bit elusive in description and challenging in implementation. It’s the right-brain counterpart to the left-brain management process. One of these is an Excel™ spreadsheet, and the other is finger painting on vodka.

As to description, there are three major categories for thinking about sales leaders magic and they include:

• Strategy – The big pieces- market, product, big-account sales, budget, key account management. These are all areas where experience, insight, instincts and that last piece of je ne c’est quoi come together.
• Coaching – Shaping the “how” and the “what” that will be executed in the strategy created. It shows up as tactics, however, which tactic to use when is where the value is.
• Troubleshooting – The ability to decide what to do when you are out of tricks in the bag and have to conjure answers from thin air.

They all require a deep understanding of people, what is possible with your own company and your prospect’s company. Of course there is also the sales leader’s own broad background from a hundred plus other sales experiences, winning and losing, to frame the ideas and answers in relevant examples.

Guidelines for Great Sales Leadership Magicians

1. Battles are won before they’re begun. The best sales leaders do their work in the planning phase of each step in a managed process. This means that the important sales calls and meetings are road-mapped and role-played well in advance. It means that the reactions are anticipated and a guideline has been established. What people, what information, what challenges and objections are all considered and determined before the meeting ever takes place. Great strategy is not done on the fly- and even though it may be methodical, it is no less magic.
2. Coaches are on the sidelines. I have worked with many Sales Leaders who have only one trick in their trick bag- “Take Me.” They themselves are the magic, which means that they can only see themselves as the solution to any particular challenge. Many times they are right, the best solution is for them to go. If they do, they’ll be amazing and the prospect will close. However, it develops nothing in the organization. Besides, the role of sales leadership is to develop others, not just do. The best Sales Leaders stay on the sidelines most of the time. For one Sales Leader I worked with, we set up a simple set of rules:
   • If an opportunity was <$100,000 in revenue, he could only provide insight when asked. He could not talk to the client by phone nor participate in meetings.
   • If an opportunity was between $100,000 and $250,000 in revenue, he could participate in client calls by phone, but not in sales calls.
   • If an opportunity was over $250,000 in revenue, he could participate in meetings.

   The point of this example is not prescriptive. It is, however, illustrative that if the organization’s sales people are going to develop and the company is going to grow, magic has to be sparingly used.

3. Show your work. No matter what magic it is that a Sales Leader has performed, a sales rep will try to imitate the same trick at another time in another place. For this reason, you need to explain your magic, why you did what you did this time and why it was the right thing to do this time but not every time.  If you don’t, they have a high potential of messing it up. You’re your lesson stick? Who knows- but you have a better chance of passing on the limitations of what you are doing by explaining it than you do by hoping that they guess correctly.
4. Do the same trick twice. Magicians will tell you to never do the same trick twice because it becomes easier to figure out with repetition. For that reason alone, do the same trick twice and more so that people figure out why you are picking the strategies, coaching their behaviors, and troubleshooting according to a model. You want them to get better because it makes them better and increases the quality of problems you get to do your magic on.
5. Cluster your best tricks. When I am working with sales teams and we develop a strategy or troubleshoot a problem, my immediate question is, “Who else has a client or prospect for whom this approach would be a fit right now?” Through leveraging up my efforts with other sales people’s issues, we get more impact and greater long-term traction.
6. When to do magic. In my past blog, “Great Sales Management Isn’t Pretty”, I wrote about following a sales meeting process. The process tells you what accounts require magic. It is my strong recommendation that you do not try to do magic in that meeting. Rather, schedule another time when you can bring the right people, information and mindset to the discussion. If you try to do magic in the moment during that meeting, you will muck it up. You will not have all of the information that you need, you may not have all of the people that you need and you will not have the right-brain mindset. This is a recipe that will produce less than magical results.

Sales management is about process, sales leadership is about application. As my dad taught me, if you do your process correctly you earn the right to do your magic.

I was flying with a senior engineer from one of the top 5 aerospace companies in the world this week as he was on a trip to meet with a number of his suppliers around the country. He’s been an engineer on the supply chain management side for years in several different very large companies. I asked him his thoughts on smaller suppliers- how can they get into a big company, how can they grow their business and what are some of the common mistakes. A couple things I got from our conversation include:

Getting In
The traditional answers came up, but some nuggets came out. Industry networking – figure out a way to connect to the senior people at trade shows. Read the papers and articles in the industry and contact those authors who are active engineers in the companies with whom you would like to do business. LinkedIn is an emerging way to reach out to senior people and he is seeing more social media connection going on, especially in the specialty groups that are formed inside of LinkedIn and other SM platforms.

Procurement
He saw my eyes roll and he laughed, but he tried to reassure me that this is still a good way to get in. His point was that starting at the top and working on getting an executive sponsor in Procurement/Purchasing/SCM is still the right move. Most small companies look at these areas as processes to follow or areas to avoid. However, his point is that the executives in these areas get big points for bringing in good suppliers who solve problems. If there is a mix of smaller suppliers who make the grade, they get every bit as much credit as working with a big supplier. In addition, smaller suppliers are easier to move into the “Top Supplier of the Year” winner’s circle at the end of the year because they are easier to develop, which is another way those executives keep score. His point was that the executives in this area of the business are getting their heat from the company for failing suppliers of any size. If they can get a quick resolution to a real problem by bringing in a smaller but successful supplier, it is a big win.

Main Suppliers
Being a second to a prime supplier is a successful route and often leads to the second becoming a prime over time. His emphasis was the “over time.” The route is second, co-developed parts, prime, and this cycle moves slowly.

Here’s what he said about growing your business:
Small companies are often looking for the fast win and fast growth, so they push too early. By being painstakingly perfect on initial orders, the follow-on orders and projects will come more quickly. Go slow to move fast.

Also, he said that smaller companies who ask for help, collaborate and are transparent rocket to the top of the list. The ones who hide their issues, close down or try to solve everything themselves do not look like good partners- they look suspicious.

Visibility Is Big
Bring more people to the meetings when the big company comes to your site. Use the visits not only as quality control and education sessions but do in-services, brainstorming, and problem-solving sessions. When you visit the big company, take more people. Take senior people, take the president, when the big company is in the offices regardless of the level of person who comes, the executives of the smaller company need to show up and spend time.

Also, who is directly working the account is a HUGE issue. Don’t use younger, inexperienced people in any way on the account. Senior people need to handle the account management, the regular touch point work, any engineering, production or logistics areas.  If the bigger company makes a comment about a person they like or dislike, take it very seriously. Those relationships are very impacting to the overall companies’ relationships in many ways behind the scenes.

I think for many of us who work in the small business to big business arena, these thoughts echo our own impressions and experience of how this works: a good reminder and all of that.

However, I found the conversation interesting because of some general tones that were worth noting:

1. Smaller is better: The general sense was that his experience was that he preferred smaller vendors because of responsiveness, leverage and quality. His big issues were resources and that he felt that as those companies grew they sometimes “forgot who brought them to the dance.”
2. Playing favorites: Once a smaller company became a “go to guy for me,” he would maneuver the system to favor that company very aggressively. However, that company had to be able to respond with the same energy, quality and success on the next project or they became pigeonholed and would not get many new opportunities.
3. Whining v. collaborating: His point was that he and his people would work tirelessly with a company that they liked, who demonstrated that they were working just as hard and who collaborated. They cut off the whiners – those companies who had no ideas, who waited for his group to make all of the revisions and who seemed to sit on the other end of the rope waiting to be pulled up instead of at least grabbing onto the rope and to start climbing.

For most everyone reading this I think you will feel as I did about this conversation, invigorated. It clarifies from behind the curtain what the market thinks about your efforts and how it will respond to your approach.